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Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Research - Influence of meditation on anti-correlated networks in the brain

I have posted work from Zoran Josipovic before - he is looking at meditation and the brain from a variety of perspectives. This new article published in the open access Frontiers in Human Neuroscience looks at the impact of various forms of attentional awareness on the normal competition between intrinsic (internal and self-related) and extrinsic (external and environment-related) brain functions. Focused awareness increases that competition while nondual awareness decreases it, compared to baseline fixated attention states.

3Department of Psychology and SCAN, Columbia University, New York, USA

Human experiences can be broadly divided into those that are external
and related to interaction with the environment, and experiences that
are internal and self-related. The cerebral cortex appears to be divided
into two corresponding systems: an “extrinsic” system composed of brain
areas that respond more to external stimuli and tasks and an
“intrinsic” system composed of brain areas that respond less to external
stimuli and tasks. These two broad brain systems seem to compete with
each other, such that their activity levels over time is usually
anti-correlated, even when subjects are “at rest” and not performing any
task. This study used meditation as an experimental manipulation to
test whether this competition (anti-correlation) can be modulated by
cognitive strategy. Participants either fixated without meditation
(fixation), or engaged in non-dual awareness (NDA) or focused attention
(FA) meditations. We computed inter-area correlations (“functional
connectivity”) between pairs of brain regions within each system, and
between the entire extrinsic and intrinsic systems. Anti-correlation
between extrinsic vs. intrinsic systems was stronger during FA
meditation and weaker during NDA meditation in comparison to fixation
(without mediation). However, correlation between areas within each
system did not change across conditions. These results suggest that the
anti-correlation found between extrinsic and intrinsic systems is not an
immutable property of brain organization and that practicing different
forms of meditation can modulate this gross functional organization in
profoundly different ways.